 Welcome to today's Connecting to Collections Care webinar. Connecting to Collections Care is a program of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and technical support from learning times. And this program was begun, excuse me, by Heritage Preservation and ASLH in 2011, and FAIC has continued it as Connecting to Collections Care beginning in January of this year. We offer free webinars about once a month. The next two coming up next week on May 1 as part of the May Day 2015, we are offering a webinar that's part of a whole national initiative that's sponsored by the FAIC with funding from the Polygon Group. And then in June we're going to have a preservation metrics webinar with Heritage Health Information and Preservation Statistics program. And that registration should be on the website by the end of this week. And please check our website, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. We like all those things. And that's how you can find out what's going on. And the website is now fully operational, so be sure to check it out. And if you have anything to say about this program, good or bad, any suggestions, any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at this email address. Now, for today's webinar, our presenters are Ernest Conrad, who's a Rarity in Conservation, and that he's an engineer. He has a BF degree in civil engineering and MS in environmental engineering, and he's a professional engineer in mechanical engineering in 12 states. He's the president of Conrad Engineers and the past founder of the Landmarks Facilities Group, an engineering firm that specializes in environmental assistance for museums, libraries, archives, and historic facilities. And most importantly, he recently co-authored the ASHRAE Applications Handbook Chapter 20, Museums, Libraries, and Archives, which is part of the national standards in the areas of HVAC and refrigeration. And the first national environmental standards for cultural institutions. And our second presenter is Lisa Miebach, who's a conservator who specializes in the treatment of objects, collection surveys, and training. She was accredited by the Canadian Association of Professional Conservators in 1972. She's worked in museums and government agencies of all sizes in Italy, Iraq, Canada, and the United States. And over her long career, she's done over 180 collection surveys, facility planning, consultations, exhibit environment planning, mannequin designs for permanent and traveling exhibits, and long-range preservation plans for museums of all sizes. So we'll get started, and we'll start with Ernie. I'm going to turn it over to you. Are you ready? Turn on your microphone. Okay, I got it. Good morning everybody, or afternoon, or wherever you're from in whichever time zone. I'm going to be the first part of the presentations today. And what I'm going to talk about is, if I get this thing to go right, we're going to talk about HVAC stuff, and what's important is to know all the different things in our environment that affect the collections that we have. And so we're going to talk about each of those things and how these collections have to deal with these different environmental factors. And there's actually only six of these things that we have to memorize. And after that, we'll talk about a couple simple solutions for you folks. I'm going to start with some basic information, and I have a question for you all. The question is, how many people know what a BTU is? And Susan's going to put up a poll. So the question is, how many people know what a BTU is? That's not bad. What's interesting is, a BTU is a British thermal unit. It has nothing to do with the British people. I'm not sure how I ever got that title. Basically, one BTU is the amount of heat it takes to raise one pound of water, one degree Fahrenheit. All my units today are going to be in English units. So you have to convert over this set of grade, basically these are two to one ratios. One set of grade is worth about two Fahrenheit. And the next thing we have to know about is, as we go through these different six heat loads, there are two types. Here is the type that's called a sensible heat. Sensible heat is the energy that just changes temperature. So things like the heat from a light bulb is dry. So that's what's called sensible heat. The other piece of the engineering here is what's called latent heat. And latent heat is the moisture part of energy, like people when you sweat, that moisture is latent. So everything comes in two pieces. Either sensible or it's latent. And all these things, we measure them in terms of BTUs. So all these different elements that we think about it, we have to use BTUs in a watt, one watt of electricity. One watt is equivalent to 3.4 BTUs. And that's a sensible heat load. Now, when it comes to moisture, all our heat is measured in BTUs again. And the simple thing is to remember is 1,000 BTUs is the amount of energy it takes to take one pound of liquid water and turn it into one pound of vapor. So the 1,000 BTUs of moisture is that energy to take you from to a liquid to a gas state. So with that, let's see if we can figure all this stuff out. What you see here is this happens to be Grand Central Station in wonderful New York City. It's just like any other big old train station on the planet. And if we look at this image, we can start to see what are the different types of heat loads that affect this building. If you look in the upper right side, there's windows. So we have solar, so solar energy. And if we look, there's some in the background, there's some lights and things like that. But basically, the lights are the other piece. And that's a sensible heat load. Solar is a sensible heat load. And then, of course, we have people. All the people walking around. And so the people are both a combination of sensible and latent. And the way it works out is when we think of solar energy, if I take one square foot of surface, horizontal, at high noon on June 21st, that one square foot has about 237 BTUs of heat on that surface. So if you think about your museums that have these skylights, all these wonderful things, you have 1,000 square feet of skylights, take that 1,000 square feet and multiply it by 237. That's the amount of BTUs of heat that's coming through those skylights. And we talked about lights being converted from watts into BTUs by multiplying 3.4. So if I had a 100 watt light bulb, that light bulb gives off 3,400 BTUs of heat. That's a sensible heat. And the people part, like myself right now, I'm calmly sitting, a little bit nervous, but I'm putting out about 250 BTUs of sensible heat. And I'm also giving off about 250 BTUs of latent heat, and that's every hour. So total altogether, I'm giving off about 500 BTUs per hour of heat from my body. Okay, and half of that is sensible, and half of that is latent. Okay, the next piece we have is when we think about the building on the rope, we have a thing called transmission. Transmission is the amount of heat that flows through the walls of the building, from outdoors to the indoors, or from the indoors out to the outdoors, okay? And when we measure transmission, transmission is measured, it was called U-value. And it's interesting, when you go to the store, and if you're going to buy some insulation, usually you'll see the manufacturer advertises an R-value. It says it's got R30 insulation, R15. And in our world, we use the inverse of that. If we take that R and divide it into one, you'll get U. So U is nothing more than the inverse of R. And one of the things that they do in the store, the reason that the manufacturers use R is because the bigger the R number, the more you have to pay. So if they use the U-value, it would make no sense that the smaller the number, the more you have to pay. So they use the advertising in the stores of using R. In our engineering world, I use U. So to give you an idea of what some U-values are, 10 inches of concrete actually resists the flow of heat pretty well. So it has a U-value of 0.61. C-core is as to where is the U-value of 0.58. 8 inches of brick, 0.48. 12 inches of stone, so it's about 0.55. 8 inch concrete block is about 0.52. Single glass is about terrible. 1.13 glass. Single glass is one of the worst U-values that you can work with because it lets heat pass through it very easily. So it has no resistance to speak of. And double glass is a little bit better. It has a U-value of 0.55. And if you look at triple glass, it has a U-value of about 0.36. Okay, so now we've got those all figured out. And if we think about it, if you buy actual real insulation, like 1-inch or rigid foam board, it has a U-value of about 0.2. So when you see that 1-inch of insulation board in the store, it has an R of 5 stamped on it. Well, R of 5 inverse is 0.2. So it's one on the same. But you see all materials do have some form of insulation capability. It'll slow down the transfer heat. Some are much better than others, and glasses are about the worst of them all. Okay. Now, the chart we have here, it takes those U-values, and this chart is what I like to call Architects Denial. And what that means is a lot of people and architects don't understand how condensation occurs. And what this chart shows, if we look on the far right-hand side, there's a table and the values show outdoor temperature. And those are these parallel lines. And so if I look at an example where it says zero, that's zero degrees Fahrenheit outside. So that's outdoor temperature. And then on the bottom we have what's called U-values and materials. In this particular case, we have the dotted line at 0.5, I call it 5-5, or thereabouts. So that's probably insulating glass. So it says U-value of 0.5. And if we follow that dotted line up to where it touches with zero degrees Fahrenheit outdoors, and then make a left-hand turn on the left side, this tells you the relative humidity at which point condensation will occur. And ladies and gentlemen, this thing has never been wrong yet. So if I have insulating glass that's zero degrees outside, I will not have any condensation on that glass until it gets up to about 40% relative humidity. So if I had 50% relative humidity in space, I will have condensation. And that's how this chart works. It's a great little chart. You can take it to the bank with you. It's always right. But what's interesting, if you take a look at a U-value we said glass is 1.1. So 1.1, way down there in the bottom right-hand corner, and if it's zero degrees outside, I am going to have condensation on my windows at about 10 or 15% RH. It doesn't take very much. So if I want to have a humidified building and all I have is single pane glass, condensation is going to be a major problem. So this chart works very well. You can take a look at different types of U-values and materials. And the one thing that I always found out is there's a magic number. The magic number is 0.4. If I have a U-value of my wall material of 0.4 or smaller, I will never have condensation virtually. Because if you look at the 0.4 and 0 degrees outside, it's about 50% RH. So if I have a U-value of 0.4 or less, I can always maintain an environment of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 50% RH, because everybody loves to have that in the museum. And that works very well. So anything less than 0.4 is a good enough insulator that it's unlikely that you're going to get condensation. So you can make things like a brick building that has no insulation. That was a U-value of about 0.6 or 0.7. And now you can use this to determine at what point you're going to have condensation. Okay. So as you all become smarter and smarter and smarter, it must be dangerous. The next thing that happens is we have two more elements that we have to worry about. And the next one is infiltration. And infiltration is the air that leaks into a building, comes in one end and goes back out the other end. And usually when we talk about infiltration, and this infiltration is outside air, so it's both sensible and it's latent because it has moisture in it. And this material, as it moves in and out of the building, generally we take a modern building, say something built in the 1970s and later. We normally see an infiltration rate of about one air change per hour. And that may not sound like a lot, but if you think about it, every hour the complete volume inside a building comes in one end and goes out the other. So infiltration is a huge element in our environment that affects our collections dramatically. And it's probably one of the few of these different types of heat loads that we know the least about. But it is there, and it's a major number, if you think about it, every hour the complete volume of the air in your building changing over. Now some of these new green buildings and high performance buildings we talk about now, they're able to get their infiltration rates down to maybe about a half of an air change per hour. But even at a half of an air change per hour, that's still an awful lot of outside air which depending where you are, it's humid or it's very dry, and we're trying to maintain the relative humidity inside the building. That's a big number you have to take on. Okay, now the last one is a thing called outside air. In our world of engineering, we use the word ventilation. Ventilation is the same as outside air. Lots of people use the word ventilation as if it's just air going around and around and around. But in the engineering world, ventilation is outside air. That's the outside air. It's mandated by code. The building codes say you have to have so much outside air pumped into your building so that you can be nice and comfortable and you're not going to have a build-up of carbon dioxide and odors and things of that nature. So it's fresh air they call it. It used to be fresh air, now it's just outside air. But it's the air that we have to bring in by code into our buildings for people to come through. So that's the six of them. Now the next thing we should talk about a little bit is these different elements. And moisture is probably the most important of them all. And the way we measure our moisture is moisture is measured in the air in terms of pounds of water per pound of dry air. So it might not sound like it's all that uncomplicated, but a pound of air. Anybody know how big a pound of dry air is? I'll help you out. One pound of dry air is about 13.5 cubic feet. So if you can think about the room, every 13.5 cubic feet of air weighs about one pound. So we measure relative humidity and we measure it in terms of pounds of water per pound of dry air. If I were to take as an example, let's take 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 50% pH. That amount of moisture has about 0.0075 pounds of water in every pound of dry air. So you have 13.5 cubic feet of air and you get a 50% relative humidity. The total amount of water that's in that air is 0.0075 pounds. It is tiny. If I take that same package of air, 13.5 cubic feet, and I take it from 50% relative humidity and put it up to 100% relative humidity, the amount of water now that's in that one pound of air is 0.016. So 0.016 pounds of water, that's like a half a teaspoon full, has the amount of water to get 100% relative humidity inside of 13.5 cubic feet of air. So you can get a feel for how delicate it is such a small amount of moisture in the air can cause saturation and it can cause very high relative humidity with very little difficulty. And this is why it's so hard and so costly to try and maintain a tight relative humidity in your space. The machinery that has to do that has to be very precise and it is costly to do that. So you can see that this tiny, tiny amount of water is enough to cause mold and all those other yucky things. Okay, another thing to know about too is organics. So much of our collections are organic materials or wood and things like that. And these things are called hygroscopic. Now what we mean by hygroscopic is that wood can absorb water and it can give water off. So if we take wood and stick it in the oven when nobody's looking, turn it up about 200 degrees and it drives all the moisture out. If I take the wood back out and let it sit in the environment it will absorb water and it can gain weight. And normally wood has about 5% to 10% by weight of water all the time. So when we have, we talk about wood is rotting. Wood starts to rot when it's moisture content starts to get to be 15 to 25%. That's weight by water. So you think one quarter of the way of the wood is moisture. And this is moisture in a vapor's form. So what happens is if you think about the sun coming up in daytime, the sun heats up the wood, drives the moisture out. The sun goes down at night, the way the wood cools off. It now absorbs moisture. So given that, how many people know Lucy? There we go. The question is, how many people know Lucy? Well, we're going to tell you a little bit about Lucy. She was called an architectural folly. She was built by an architect who was in Margate, New Jersey. He's right down from Atlantic City. And he's trying to sell land for people to come vacation. So he builds this 60-foot-high elephant. And that is a houda on the top. People would go up inside this thing, stand up in the houda, and they would look out over the land to see a piece of property that they're going to buy. And that's Lucy. And so what we talk about, Lucy, she's a perfect example of some things we can do and how the moisture works and how we can protect things. How many people have ever visited Lucy? We have a couple people out there. Four? Five? Okay, well, she's down there in Margate, New Jersey. She is an organization called APT, Association of Preservation Technology. Lucy was the first cover girl on that journal. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to the next picture. And you can see that this is Lucy. She's right there at the Atlantic Ocean. She's not going to couple thousand, or maybe a thousand yards or less from the Atlantic Ocean. So she lives there. And if you look at her skin, Lucy is a wood frame animal. And she has a covering. It's a turn-coated tin covering, which is all soldered together and then is taped with a rubber mastic tape over each of the joints. So she's almost waterproof. So you could think of her as being so tight that she could probably even float. But that's Lucy's skin, okay? Now, if we look at Lucy, if you look a little closer, you see the rust. So she has water pouring out of her. Out of her trunk. Her tongue has been drooling. She's had to always bottle the water that comes running outside the insides of Lucy. So we look inside of Lucy. So what you see there is that Lucy is a museum. And in the middle there, you can see a little memorabilia and things of that nature, which we're trying to protect as her collections and as people are there. And you'll notice inside, there's a foil-faced insulation all on the inside. And this used to be a house. A family actually lived in Lucy at one time. And you'll see the framing there. It's all metal framing now. At one time it was all wood framing, but it's been changed because of rot. And so there used to be walls inside of here, these vertical walls that used to be part of a house. So we're looking at Lucy and it's all in that insulation. If I were to go and take my hand underneath that insulation, this is what we see. I could reach in there and I could pull out a fistful of rotted wood, soak in wet, it's unbelievably wet. And so the question is, what made Lucy rot? I'll help you with that a little bit, because what we talk about is all this material inside is wood. And wood is hygroscopic. So think about the sun activity on Lucy. Lucy is really the world's largest terrarium. If you guys were ever kids when you had a child or whatever and you had a terrarium. What it is, it's a jar with a small hole in it so that moisture can move in and out of that hole. And if we think about the activity of the sun, the sun does most of its heat on the earth for about six hours during the day. Maybe from like 10 o'clock until maybe 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And then the rest of the 18 hours of the day, the sun does not put any heat into the building, and so things cool. And so we look at Lucy's wood. Her wood absorbs moisture during 16 hours of the day and it only releases moisture during 8 hours of the day. So it's not an equal balance. And so what happens is each day when the sun goes up and comes down, we start to have an increase in the amount of moisture within Lucy. And that wood gets more and more and more wet and wet, and finally it becomes saturated. And not to help anything is to have that insulation on the inside. And so what happens is the moisture gets trapped. It's trapped between Lucy's metal skin and insulation, which is actually on the wrong side. But you don't want it on the other side because it'll look ugly. So what happens is we're getting condensation is occurring inside of Lucy and it runs down in the other belly and absolutely is rotted Lucy out in less than 15 years of when she was most recently renovated that it has gotten a lot. So what's the solution? Let's talk about some simple solutions. A simple solution, if we look inside, the first thing we do is get rid of that insulation. As the worst thing you could possibly do is have insulation in the wrong place where it's going to trap moisture. So we take out the insulation and if you look at what's going on here, the solution is what's called a box and a box. If I take Lucy and inside those walls, I will build a building. I will build a box, a box the size of the house inside of Lucy and inside that box I have now people and collections and I put climate control in that inner box. On the outsides for all the other elements of the animal are the trunk and legs and all that stuff, just let it just go with mother nature. What you want to do is let air simply move in and out and keep it dry. So that's a box and a box solution. You can do this time and time again in your careers, in your historic buildings and things like that, is to use the box and a box. Last but not least is a thing called humanostatic heating. This is a simple technique and what you see here is a building up in New England and the top lines are temperature and the building is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and what we're going to do is we're going to turn the heat off down the bottom you see the relative humidity lines. So at 60 degrees I turn the heat off and over a 24 hour period you can see the temperature drops down to 40 degrees and down the bottom and as the temperature drops down to 40 the relative humidity increases from about 10% up to 40% and that's at 2 to 1 ratio and you can do this time and time again as I change the temperature for every 1 degree Fahrenheit I will change the relative humidity by 2 percentage point. So you can take a thermostat in the wall and switch it out for a humidostat and you can control the relative humidity simply by changing the temperature. Now the thing is 40 degrees is not too comfortable but then I'm trying to protect my collections. But this is called humidostatic heating. I can change the temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit each time and I'll gain 2 percentage points. And so with that I am going to stop at this point and I'm going to let Lisa take on. So thank you very much. OK, thank you very much Ernie. That's great. We do have some questions for you and just very quickly here from Elizabeth McGuire from Fallondale, Pennsylvania was asking how can you effectively measure humidity? OK, that's an excellent question because what we have done in the past is we've used a thing, a hygrothermograph. And that chart you're looking at right now that is a chart from a hygrothermograph. What that hygrothermograph is is basically it's a human hair and we all know that the hair of a human is hygroscopic and expands and contracts depending upon the relative humidity. So you take a human hair and you tie it to an arm with an ink pen on it and there's a rotating drum and that's what this chart shows right there will measure the change of the moisture in the air as a human hair expands and contracts. But nowadays we use electronic devices. We use thin-filled capacitors devices and we use what's called RTDs, which is a temperature detector and these things are electronic sensors that can actually measure the moisture in the air and they give you a direct readout in relative humidity. And my favorite is a manufacturer called Weissela, V-A-I-L-V-I-S-A-L-A, Weissela. And they have a great little handheld instrument. It's a very fast response. It's very accurate and you can find them in the website. Okay. That's great. Thank you very much. We also have a question from Tony Manning from Fort Smith, Arkansas. The question is, you've mentioned the 70-50 rule several times now. However, IPI has done research showing this rule is not sustainable nor necessary. Is this new research incorporated into the latest A-S-H-R-E-E book? And this is a little lengthy so I'll copy it and repaste it in the chat and you can also see it in a parking lot there. Okay. Another good question. It's interesting. That's an Ash Ray Handbook. In fact, I was the co-author of the chapter that talks about the 70-50. And I should correct myself that it's not a rule. It was a rule. It's no longer a rule. It's becoming a moving target. And I think the Smithsonian has probably been on a leading edge along with IPI who has taken a bold stand and said, you guys are killing yourselves. You're trying too hard. And I said that a room with 50% relative humidity, the amount of moisture is only 0.0075 pounds in a whole 13 cubic feet of air. It is virtually impossible to try and maintain that kind of perfection. And the thing is, your collections know that. Different collections have different sensitivities, but by far the most recent research, they're showing a much larger variation. That's being acceptable. So I just use the 70-50 as an example. Not as a rule. I hope that answers your question. So if there are no more questions for any, we'll turn this over to Lisa. So while we're doing this, there it is. Okay, Lisa, you're on. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to see a lot of old friends and these that's really terrific. So from far away places and strange sounding names, glad to see you're here. I want to thank Susan for inviting me to join you and Mike for handling these technical issues so we can actually relax and chat. It's not a very big chat window, but we can make do. These are the lessons that I learned from doing a lot of surveys in museums. And in so many places, we found that people just don't have the money to follow the recommendations that they may have gotten in surveys or heard about from other people. So what I'll be showing you is talking about threats to your collections from light, rapid changes in humidity and temperature, tests, damage from untrained handling and loss from poor security. I'll run through some of these slides that illustrate the most common causes of damage to collections and believe me, they were not staged. This was real life. And then we'll have a discussion place where you can ask some specific questions. I will cover the major threats to collections and what you can do about it, but as you'll see on the lower left side of your screen, I've uploaded some documents for you. One is a paper called What to Do When You Can't Afford to Do Anything that the ASLH asked me to do. And a list of suppliers in the U.S. who can provide the materials that I mentioned in that paper. So, starting. Our major threats, as you know, are light, rapid changes in temperature and relative humidity, tests, untrained handling and theft. And all of you who work in the field know that there are lots of others as well. Light is perhaps our biggest problem. And I realize that compared to relative humidity changes, that doesn't seem like it might be. But one of the big issues is that we don't pay a lot of attention to light because of damage because we're familiar with it. But light is energy. And energy can break the molecular bonds of organic materials, causing fading and weakness on textiles, leather, wood products and some paints. There are a lot of articles available on this if you're interested in learning about visible and UV lights and the kinds of filters you can put on windows and lighting fixtures that will help you to reduce or control light levels. On a practical note, most visitors can see quite well at low levels, providing that they've been led gradually from bright outside areas and windows to lower light levels. And that even wall washer elimination is used rather than bright spots and dark shadows. It is important to remember that older visitors have more difficulty seeing displays in low lighting. Some things have buttons to push to provide these periods of higher light levels. The lux or foot candle light meter is a very useful tool for museums as it's really difficult to evaluate light levels by eye. Inexpensive models can be obtained from Edmunds Scientific Company. I used to use the Lutron LX101 lux meter and liked it a lot. That's the Lutron LX101 light meter. And then we have the problem of the lack of building latency. That gets us inside and out if we could put it that way. This drain pipe that you see that seems to be standing up based on an anti-gravity field more than anything else comes down to the ground and on the left you'll see where it exits into a drain except the drain's been run over by mowing machines and so it's not actually a drain at all it's just a heap of rubble. I listed up here I don't know if you can see my arrow these are the three most common machines that are used for measuring temperature and humidity. One of our biggest problems is rapid changes in extremes in temperature and RH and we all have seen the damage that they cause. Too little and things crack. Too much and we get mold and mold stains. But if you're careful about how you package things for storage and you have good engineering controls you can pretty well prevent this damage. Pests. They're tiny. You don't see them. In the lunch room where everybody gathers and shares their homemade coffee cake those little crumbs fall off the table and they go into the corners and provide a wonderful smorgasbord for bugs of all kinds. Dust is another hazard because it makes a nice cozy place for bugs to breed. Dust and plant soil harbour mites you usually don't see these on potted plants but they're there and they then in turn service food for other insects that will attack collections. Dust can also be really abrasive for decorated surfaces and if it's left in place and people run their hands over you can often find that the surface is abraded by the dust. So it's really important that staff are trained in cleanliness cleaning areas, coffee rooms and storage areas and if your museum has receptions or parties as more and more do it's really important to clean up carefully right after not just the standard cleaning crew on contract but the conservator needs to go around follow them and make sure that they do a really thorough job. So basically test control is really staff training. Handling. I know you've all seen many cases of poor handling or sometimes docents will pick up artifacts and sling them under their arms and then go through a closed door to get to the gallery and talk to the little kitties and along the way I've seen artifacts dropped by the way and these bits and pieces they used to continue to be fixed. So I found boxes that I could give things in. In this case we see that the paintings are leaning up against each other, scratching each other and we also see that fragile books are being pulled apart by people sticking their finger in grabbing them and pulling them out with one finger. I'm sure that all of you are teaching your docents and your volunteers how to handle things properly. Storage materials are a big favorite of mine and I know of many of you because we found that so many of the materials that we thought were good storage materials weren't. The coin on the right was stored in a standard slide storage page made of PVC polyvinyl chloride and in a moist environment that chloride actually forms hydrochloric acid. In this case it's corroded the coin and destroyed its unismatic value. We do have now a lot of information on which materials are safe to use with collections and I recommend to you the Spinach Handbook which is a wonderful source for both materials and methods for storage. The article Good But Cheap that I've appended also has a list of supplies and suppliers. We have collections management. We used to just have a book where people would write down new collections coming into the museum. But nowadays we really need something that is much more specific and it's usually computerized. There are a lot of databases for museums. Some of them are good and some of them are really labor intensive as flexible as you would like. A good database will contain a space for how long an artifact is on display and where it's traveled so that you can suggest to a curator when it's time for it to have a rest and suggest to alternative artifacts that they might use instead. These databases are kind of nifty because you can link them up to gallery kiosks so visitors can click on a picture and get more information about an object or professional researchers may use them and of course they can serve as a database for a museum website. But look very carefully before you commit to a database and be sure that it has room for the fields that you want to add to handle the issues in your museum. Inventory control is essential too. There are a lot of problems with those little numbers written on nail polish and India ink I'm quite fond of those but there aren't very many of us anymore who can write those beautiful little numbers that people used to be able to do. Fortunately we have special barcodes and RFID tags. The RFID tags are really terrific the art bank in Ottawa uses them as a receiver on each door jam. So as they move something from one place to another the collection inventory is always up to date and that's wonderful. You can also use these RFID tags and galleries for people to use like a QR code with their smart phone and get more information. Security obviously we still need the physical access control but the way that your building is designed and the restrictions that are put on access are very important in keeping the wrong people out of the right places. The inventory control should also be used whenever something has changed in exhibits or collections are moved or people in community museums may take something out to show it at home or it may be used in a ceremony or a celebration so it's very handy to have a way of tracking exactly where your stuff is. It's kind of like that old slogan do you know where your kid is tonight? As I said numbers on the artifacts are essential since we don't yet have ways of attaching invisible identification systems but the kind that you use will depend on the budget that you have and the people that you have. I've mentioned the RFID tags and alarm systems but do please consider the stability of that are used to attach tags or to write numbers on. Even on the conservation gist list I've seen a note of people using resins that we would not use under any other circumstances as something to write a number on and that's really not been discussed very much. Emergency preparedness planning I can't stress enough. I think many of you may recognize these particular objects. They were burned in a fire the museum was having a roof put on and the welders let a spark into the underlay and the museum burned. Fortunately this was happening in a city where AIC had a meeting so some of us went ahead of the meeting to see what we could do and organize people to help and I'm proud to say that we had a large train of people who marched down the street and went in and cleaned everything and packaged it for storage so that it could be safely could be safely stored until the museum was able to actually get around to thinking about those collections. But you really need to have your emergency preparedness plan. I've listed a really good one thanks to Susan's suggestion the dplan.org which was I think created by NEDCC but I recommend to every museum have the assistance of an experienced emergency preparedness planner to help you work out a real plan where everybody knows what to do there was a museum that I worked with in Wisconsin who were very excited about their plan they did a really good job and guess what their museum burned. However because they had already made contact with other museums in the area and done their planning about where they could move collections they were able to rapidly move their most important pieces out of the building and into safe storage and avoid having them deluged or blown to bits by the firemen. So what can you do when you can't afford to do anything? You don't have an HVAC system you don't want to look forward to trying to get one because you know you'll never have the money but we do have humidity and we also have air-saving materials that can protect objects from rapid changes. I usually use acid-free boxes and there's a wonderful phrase that Dennis filled out when some of you may know called a box within a box within a box and this gives you a stable dust-protecting home for your artifact airspace buffers. So if you have a box an object in a box in a bigger box or closed cabinet your objects can probably weather some HVAC disasters without too much trouble. You can use materials like washed cotton fabric as shelf covers and also for curtains to keep the dust out and those are also humidity buffering material. Cotton absorbs up to 11% of its weight which is not really exciting when you consider that linen will do 14% or more. So well you can see that on the screen there so I won't I'm trying not to read it to you. If you are remodeling the museum or building a new one it's really really really important to think about functional space you have to have a space design that fits what you need to have happen and not vice versa and not have somebody design you a lovely building where you don't have them to store things or a lovely building where your 14 foot high paintings won't go through any 11 foot high doors I've actually seen artifact technicians moving paintings from one floor to another by putting them by lowering the elevator down to ground level climbing onto the top of the elevator and holding the painting while they ride up to the next floor and fortunately nobody's ever been squished but that really seems to be the hard way of moving things. So if you're going to be thinking about a new space or remodeling an old space think of these how are you going to control your temperature humidity and light and will it be easy to do pest prevention with housekeeping and cleaning how are you going to motivate your staff to sweep up or clean up or not bring in their cookie crumbs you need a good workspace for collections often there isn't really enough space to spread things out and look at them carefully and measure them and put them in the catalog and you do need workshops heavy duty equipment like table saws and that means special electrical outlets for example and jump back space it's called so that if your table saw has a mind of its own and starts to chase you you can jump back and get out of the way you also probably need workshops of this kind to develop things for exhibits and for outreach please find somebody who will be your OSHA specialist and make sure that all of the rules and regulations are followed that's a liability issue on the one hand as well as a safety issue I'd like to put in a small pitch for Manona Rosol from Art and Theater Safety in New York Manona is an amazing resource for health and safety and knows about the chemical properties a lot of the insulating materials and glues that we're commonly finding today long range conservation plan this will save you a lot of grief in the long run and many of you have had long range conservation plans or have done them for other museums in time if you don't have one apply for a grant and get somebody experienced to help you you need to evaluate your collections before you start doing conservation you need to know which are the important things which are the ones that are most threatened and not just the ones that are the prettiest and will go in a gallery easily look at the physical aspects of the museum and see where there are dangers to your collections is it that your doors are too small or you don't have a place to put things down temporarily if they're heavy while you're moving from one area to another think about improvements that you would need in storage and display and know which are the most significant objects in your collection and which are those that need the most conservation treatment soonest this means a lot of thinking and it's rather tedious to make a prioritized long range conservation plan but there are examples there are a lot of people who have done them they can call on and it will also help you to think think things through think of things that you haven't thought of before but maybe you should and stock up with the tools and materials that will help you carry out your plan and remember to update it at least once a year and then keep a list of your projects that you've done take photographs so when it seems like you never get ahead and you've never gotten anything done and there's just more that needs to be done than you ever will be able to you can look back and see what you really have done so I think that's it yeah that's it so if anybody has questions I'll be glad to take those I see how much to RFID systems run I don't know there are a lot of competitors now if you want to drop me a line my my email address is lmuh at heritagepres h-e-r-i-t-a-g-e-p-r-e-s dot net and I have a colleague that I used to work with who was a leader in the RFID field and I can find that out for you I'll put you in touch with him so you can actually find out who this is now he's also the guy that told me about the wireless alarm systems and it was pretty exciting because we were talking about an exhibit it was a traveling exhibit that had some extremely valuable paintings hung on the wall but the museum didn't have a lot of security and the way that the museum spaces were designed made it really easy to grab something off the wall and run something else to think about so my friend told me about this system if you put an RFID a specific RFID device on the back of the painting when it is moved like Jocelyn's picked up, handled and moved it will set off an alarm which can be either an audible one or one that connects directly to the security people and even to the police department locally so you get a head start on catching the bad guys Jen Munch yes I'm glad to hear that NMII is using that yes the art bank in Ottawa is where I saw it first and I'm sure there are others who do as well and it would be really interesting if we could have a seminar perhaps just on this Rebecca asks I've heard that food safe materials like aluminum foil or plastic lunch bags can be used that's iffy because lunch bags that is like baggies sometimes have a coating on them I'm not sure what for but people have mentioned that so I would recommend that if if you need to do something like seal up plywood that's being used for shelving or in a storage area or in a display area yeah you could use aluminum foil and just tape over the overlaps so that there's no gap there and that does a pretty good job of stopping the off gassing that would otherwise build up in a heated display case let's see so generally though especially with plastics I would recommend that you look carefully for archival quality ones again the spinach handbook has a lot of good information and there are also suppliers that I'm sure many of you know who carry conservation quality materials but no I wouldn't just use a lunch baggie to store my ancient bronzes in what I would do is wrap them in washed unbleached muslin as a humidity buffer and a dust protector with perhaps a small photograph attached to the outside of that what do you recommend for use for dusting objects that won't abrade the dust already on the object well we do want to abrade the dust but not the object of course that's kind of an interesting question you can get very nice Chinese painting brushes with white bristles on them that are soft not the hard hogs bristles and those seem to do a pretty good job if you're watching carefully but if you're dusting something that could have loose bits I would recommend that you use a magnifying visor and dust watching very carefully to be sure that you're not catching at a loose place or a crack with the fibers and then loosening it or pulling it off when I worked at a museum in Alberta we had the responsibility for furnishing for conserving the furnishings for Ukrainian cultural heritage village which was staffed by people who were wonderful interpreters but had not been trained in museum handling techniques and there was a lot of dust built up there good old prairie winds and dry land bring you a lot of dust and I couldn't find anything that was safe that people would use and it would not end up walking into their homes so I found a place that sold sheepskins and we used a wooden dowel and a strip of skin that was washed and wrapped that around in a spiral and I put a little blue puff at the end so everybody would recognize that this was the museum tool and not something for them to take home because they worked so well so these were very useful yes there could be an issue with Lanolin wrapping off on the object but in fact because the pelts are so carefully washed before they're turned into a rug or a sofa cover or whatever that didn't, we tested that with glass and it didn't turn out to be a problem because you're not scrubbing you're just dusting and the dust actually is attracted to the wool electrostatically and those worked very well so how do you store doors oh wow I haven't had to in a place that's big enough I would guess and you might treat them like paintings make a a rack like a paintings rack I'm sure you can find photos of those or go visit your local museum and ask to see their paintings rack and store them standing on the bottoms because doors are constructed quite wonderfully from a mechanical point of view but if you lean them on their sides or not directly straight up which is how they're designed to stand over time they probably reward so let me go back up here I lost this oh wait there we go doors, okay here's says we have a large painting collection and only shelving storage for now can you recommend a cheap solution to keep the paintings from getting damaged which is already happening I'm trying to box as many as possible but some for very large windows good luck Alana I think the usual painting storage is a kind of what do you call that linked fencing or some other metal grid that you can put hooks into and hang the paintings on I think that's about the best that I can suggest is to find a vertical board that you can hang them from where they will not be leaning against each other and scratching each other if you wanted to send me a picture or an email to show me a little bit better I'll be glad to discuss that with you Karen says we need guidance in what to look for in storage containers at places like Walmart can't afford to order from archival sources no budget at all oh Karen I don't know it depends what you're putting in there you know if what you have is wood or hmm if you have sensitive materials let's say that you have old coins I'm not sure I would use a Walmart container because we really don't know what kind of coatings may be involved or how their polyethylene is made if you feel that that's really important and it's the only thing you can do I would line the container I suppose we're talking about a kind of tupperware container here I would line the container with aluminum foil and then with washed textile like old sheets I used to go to when I was working in a large museum we used to buy rolls of unreached muslin which is a marvelous material to have for just about everything from making mannequins to wrapping things to keeping storage so we would wash this and then um um sorry lost my trailer thought here so you have the aluminum foil which would keep the plastic from outgassing into your objects and then you would line that with unreached muslin or another washed fabric to absorb temperature and humidity changes so you don't get condensation in there that's about the best I can say at the moment but again I'll be glad to discuss that with you so washed linen over acid free cardboard let me explain that a little bit one of the problems that we had in one of the museums was that the exhibit people liked to put objects at various heights in the vitrines on painted plywood boxes they would paint it was convenient for them easy to make they had their wood shop there and they could paint whatever color they wanted to go with the exhibit but both the wood that was outgassing the city vapors and the paint which was of unknown quality were something that we really didn't want in a closed case particularly because the exhibit lights which come from outside the case into the case create a lot of heat and that changes the relative humidity so what I eventually did was I made a variety of boxes in shapes and sizes that the exhibit people liked of acid free matte board, the thick stuff pretty easy to work with and you can use double sided tape to stick the bits together once it's stuck between the cardboard I don't think it outgasses significantly and then because linen which is really your best friend there's a reason that people wear linen in hot damp climates linen will absorb as I recall something like up to 15% of its weight in water so it's really good at absorbing excessive relative humidity cotton on the other hand will only do about 11% so it's better than nothing but the linen looks very nice and it's very effective so objects that are resting on a linen covered acid free matte board box will have more protection from changes in relative humidity than things that are sitting on a painted wood block the best place to find that kind of linen is test fabrics ink because they manufacture their fabrics for scientific testing purposes so you can specify that you don't want anything with chlorine or you don't want anything with some other contaminant that would be a problem for the artifacts you're working with. It is expensive but our exhibit designers would tickle pink when they had a choice of colors that they could choose from they're very muted colors, they're not dyed, they're the natural colors of the linen and they were very happy with those and just put them away between shows and brought them out again and used them over and over again so I do recommend that it's kind of a nice simple sort of thing using cotton for lining shelves and windows would undyed, untreated be best yes that's where unbleached muslin comes in. It's not very thick but you can do layers and those layers if you have for example five layers of thin unbleached muslin you're also creating air spaces in between those layers so you get a lot more absorptive capacity than you would with just one. New cotton materials are often treated chemically sometimes with fireproofing materials I was asked to look at a fabric ceiling in a government building that was a reception room the ceiling had originally been blue and it had turned into a really nasty yellow and they were very concerned they were willing to replace that fabric which was actually rotting and kind of well it was rotting that's what it was doing so we did some analysis to find out what had happened and it was that fireproofing had been applied to the fabric that's very acidic but there are fabrics that you can buy that have flame retardants built into them which are not acidic I can't remember off the top of my head where those are I could probably find it for you but just as a rule of thumb any fabric that you buy to use in contact with objects should be washed I recommend going to a laundry, a professional laundry and asking them to wash it once with detergent and two times just through a full rinsing cycle so that you get anything out that you can but then it's being rinsed and they can also iron it for you on your mangles so you don't have to deal with that let's see what's next needles oh yes well Robin that's a very good point use impests.net if everybody would like to write that down is a very good it's a very good reference material Robin says a single beetle could often be a random occurrence and not something to worry about if it is your best bet is to isolate or freeze the object to defumigate and keep storage areas extra clean and free from dust and debris you can also use road sticky traps to control pests and help identify or figure out how extensive your problem is absolutely very good advice freezing I had when I was in private practice in another country I was sent some things ethnographic material that had been traveling and on exhibit in controlled spaces and was looking pretty pesty so I got the biggest chest freezer I could get and a friend who knew about these things helped me to alter the settings on it so that it would actually go down to minus whatever it was the specification was and stay there normal freezer cycle so as not to cross burn the turkey inside as you probably know so I did write that up and I put it in the W A A C newsletter at one point and I think I still may have a copy of that around how we how we jury ridge the temperature control so again if you'd like to write to me I'll be glad to find that so very good point that you have though is that you really need to use your ads to find out exactly what it is that you're dealing with and it will also be interesting for you to see which tracks they make where are they going and is there a reason or where they coming from is there a reason is there a hole in the wall is there somebody who insists on eating cookies at their desk in the registration room it's important to diagnose why you have a test problem and what tests you have ah Jess Miller camp says can you talk about priorities for beginning care of a somewhat neglected collection with only a pitons for funding and one worker what should be done first inventory card catalog digitization environmental monitoring and test removal wow that's a lot good question so the paper which you should download good but cheap what to do before you do anything will give you answers to a lot of that ah yes I think inventory well no first clean it clean your spaces do your pest monitoring find out if your space is safe to keep things in secondly yes inventory or card cataloging an inventory is essential how you keep track of the inventory could be a card catalog could be a computer database ah some of you may be whizzes at using excel I only discovered a couple of years ago that there's a special format that you can find that turns every column into a ah sortable sortable column so you can put your object in there and put different attributes in different columns and then you can sort by wood or sort by stone or whatever so that will help you to find things more quickly ah environmental monitoring and test removal I think we've gone through that pretty much ah but yeah you have to have an inventory and by the way you should keep copies off site so that if you're using burns your insurance company will want to know what you've lost and you will only be able to do that if you know what you have or had and where it is if you move something in a collection you should note that you don't have to have RFID or barcodes to do that barcodes maybe a little simpler what you do have to do is convince everybody to maintain the discipline of always logging a move of an object from one place to another otherwise you hear the cries but I left this here yesterday and now I can't find it alright so now do you have these are wonderful questions guys do you have a suggestion for dealing with non-active we hope mold blooms that are present in a large costume hanging collection oh my um mold is pretty awful and it's not easy to get rid of and it stains I would talk to the textile analysis service at the University of Alberta because they know more about this kind of thing than anybody else I know they're probably are also textile conservators who dealt with this but I don't know anybody personally who has had to I think the usual recommendation is to use a heap of vacuum cleaner with several layers of screens to vacuum the mold off the textile and of course away from you and of course you're wearing a good professional quality dust mask not the kind with the filter in the front, not just the little white paper dust masks so talk to somebody from the University of Alberta textile institute and I'm sure they will have some ideas for you Deborah from Toronto has very large trophies and no boxes large enough to store them what do you suggest we'll make some acid free mat board is great stuff it's not very sturdy but you can make that to hold the piece you can even cut out a little window and glue mylar on it with double sided tape so that you can see what's in there before you have to open the box and take it out and then you can put you can build a larger box around the smaller acid free mat board boxes and Karen says we store let's see sorry just lost this anybody remember my email address and I'll be really glad if anybody wants to write to me about this because I may be able to find resources for you that are not coming to my mind right at the moment let's see trophies we store lots of fabrics old Girl Scout uniforms in large zip lock bags in plastic tokens sun missing covers also old handbooks, scrapbooks files and newspaper clippings and photos all managed by amateurs in a basement need mitigation fast and cheap we share space with a sump up and sprinkler control oh Karen you have my sympathies well the good news the good protection when the sprinklers go off at 3 o'clock in the morning so if you're missing covers go to Walmart and get some more as far as the handbooks and scrapbooks and newspaper files and photos I would suggest that you look to specialists for that I think there are specific materials that you should and should not use and there may be homemade ways that you can do it let's see the Image Permanence Institute might have some information and I think there may be others at the Library of Congress for example who could show you how they store theirs fast and cheap is hard do you have do you have a way of moving those things out of the room with the sump pump and sprinkler control water is a terrible thing I can say that because my basement just flooded and so I have lived through sump pumps and dehumidification and new sub floors and things like that I did learn that there is a kind of 2x4 waterproof that you can get at hardware stores it's more expensive but it means that you can lay that on your ground floor and then use that to put other things like plywood on top so that you have a space that you can send air through underneath if you have water in there sorry I can't really help you a lot but try Library of Congress I think they will be the best breath for the storage issue and where can you move them if worst comes to worst find the best storage company you can in your town we have a new one called Dyson here that has very sexy very clean storage areas and it may be that you can make a case for moving things out until you can at least a secured area until you can make things a bit better let's see mold blooms tree fields grill scouts we almost down to about here do you recommend lining shelves with fabric archival materials such as rollara or glue board yes fabric on its own unless it's stretched over a non acidic board so that it's basically like a painting board if you just have loose fabric you run the risk of having it as you take one thing off it may move the fabric and pull something else over so you should hold it there volara is very good you could put fabric over volara and just fasten it in the back with double sided tape glue board I have not been very familiar with if somebody else can probably tell you how archival that is and that's it so any more questions see that Susan has mentioned that there's been a long discussion in chat about making and using bins so I would refer you to that but I would say don't forget that there is a difference between the kinds of plastic materials that we have learned over decades to use in conservation and in using storage as opposed to what's okay to put your sandwich in humans are usually a little more resilient than ancient bronzes so you could use something like washed muslin wrapped around volara as a base to put things on there are a lot since we had all those wonderful grants for improving storage there probably are a lot of photographs running around on the net of how people have upgraded their storage areas and there are a lot of tips and tricks again the spinach handbook I think is an awfully good one for sources of supply and for ideas so anything else no I think that's it so I just want to thank everyone for attending and please fill out the survey the link is right here the evaluations are really important and I go over them very carefully and collect the information and I saw a couple of suggestions for possible webinars and I will follow up on those so thank you all very much and I hope I'll be seeing many of you next week on May 1st for the presentation on disaster response so thanks, bye bye there you go that's what you need guys, disaster response thank you to everybody those were really wonderful questions and I appreciate it don't hesitate to get in touch with me if I can help and thanks for a really interesting session